"Non, Monsieur! Not all bad men," and the Indian gave his shoulders an expressive shrug, "Les traitres anglais."
To the French voyageur, English meant the Hudson's Bay people. The answer set me wondering to what pass things had come between the two great companies that they were shipping each other's traders gratuitously out of the country. I recalled the talk at the Quebec Club about Governor McDonell of the Hudson's Bay trying to expel Nor'-Westers and concluded our people could play their own game against the commander of Red River.
We arrived in Fort William at sundown, and a flag was flying above the courtyard.
"Is that in our honor?" I asked a clerk of the party.
"Not much it is," he laughed. "We under-strappers aren't oppressed with honors! It warns the Indians there's no trade one day out of seven."
I suddenly recollected as far as we were concerned the past month had been entirely composed of week-days.
"Out of your reckoning already?" asked the clerk with surprise. "Wonder how you'll feel when you've had ten years of it."
Situated on the river bank, near the site of an old French post, Fort William was a typical traders' stronghold. Wooden palisades twenty feet high ran round the whole fort and the inner court enclosed at least two hundred square yards. Heavily built block-houses with guns poking through window slits gave a military air to the trading post. The block-houses were apparently to repel attack from the rear and the face of the fort commanded the river. Stores, halls, warehouses and living apartments for an army of clerks, were banked against the walls, and the main building with its spacious assembly-room stood conspicuous in the centre of the enclosure. As we entered the courtyard, one of the chief traders was perched on a mortar in the gate. The little magnate condescended never a smile of welcome till the Bourgeois came up. Then he fawned loudly over the chiefs and conducted them with noisy ostentation to the main hall. Indians and half-breed voyageurs quickly dispersed among the wigwams outside the pickets, while clerks and traders hurried to the broad-raftered dining-hall. Fatigued from the trip, I took little notice of the vociferous interchange of news in passage-way and over door-steps. I remember, after supper I was strolling about the courtyard, surveying the buildings, when at the door of a sort of barracks where residents of the fort lived, I caught sight of the most grateful object my eye had lighted upon since leaving Quebec. It was a tin basin with a large bar of soap—actual soap. There must still have been some vestige of civilization in my nature, for after a delightful half-hour's intimate acquaintance with that soap, I came round to the groups of men rehabilitated in self-respect.
"Athabasca, Rocky Mountain and Saskatchewan brigades here to-morrow," remarked a boyish looking Nor'-Wester, with a mannish beard on his face. Involuntarily I put my hand to my chin and found a bristling growth there. That was a land where young men could become suddenly very old; and many a trader has discovered other signs of age than a beard on his face when he first looked at a mirror after life in the Pays d'En Haut.